Information Integration: build the foundation of Enterprises' Competitive Advantages

(This article was first published in Shanghai informatization 2007.6/70)

In today's information economy and knowledge economy "popular" environment, as an indispensable important economic entity in modern society, the survival and development of enterprises are always linked with the development and utilization of information resources. In the fierce market competition, whether an enterprise can win by advantage depends largely on the depth, breadth, and quality of information development. "controlling information is to control the fate of an enterprise" has gradually become a consensus.

The achievements of Enterprise Informatization Construction in China are obvious to all, but there are still some marginalized and localized problems. In general, there is still a general lack of the overall concept of informatization in enterprise applications. Each application system in an enterprise usually only pays attention to one business link or management function, the overall integration, integration, and communication are not high, and an isolated information island is formed within the enterprise. This is the main knot and focus to be solved in the informatization construction of enterprises.

Formation and disadvantages of information islands

The so-called "information islands" refers to a computer application system that is functionally unrelated to each other, that is, information is not shared or exchanged, and that information is out of touch with business processes and applications. We should see that, during the rapid development of the information technology industry, enterprise IT applications are also advancing along with the development of technology. However, unlike other enterprise changes, IT applications change faster. That is to say, each local IT application carried out by an enterprise may not be compatible with previous applications, it may also be incompatible with future "more advanced" applications. Therefore, from the perspective of industrial development, the emergence of information islands has a certain degree of inevitability.

From the analysis of the enterprise's own reasons, most of the information construction in the early stage lacks long-term and overall planning. Different stages only consider various local requirements, resulting in blind introduction of various application systems, for example, if a promotion is issued by a higher-level department, or through self-developed or cooperative development or import channels. Because most application systems do not have unified technologies and data standards, data cannot be automatically transmitted, and there is a lack of effective association and sharing, thus forming isolated information islands.

Information islands are classified into "single island" and "system Island". the disadvantages of their existence are obvious. The first reason is that multiple interfaces of information are collected, repeated input, multi-head use and maintenance, and the synchronization of information updates is poor, which affects data consistency and correctness, in addition, the information resources of enterprises are dispersed and redundant. The efficiency of information use and management is low, and the unified and accurate basis is lost. Second, due to the lack of business function interaction and information sharing, the logistics, capital flow and information flow of enterprises are out of touch. As a result, the accounts and items are inconsistent, which is not only difficult to carry out accurate financial accounting, in addition, it is difficult to effectively monitor the business process and business standards. As a result, problems in the business management process cannot be detected in a timely manner, leading to problems such as out-of-control planning, excessive inventory, and hidden box operations in the procurement and sales processes, it has serious consequences such as ineffective labor, waste of resources, and loss of benefits. Once again, isolated information systems cannot effectively provide comprehensive information across departments and systems. Various types of data cannot form valuable information, and local information cannot be upgraded to management knowledge, as a result, the support for enterprise decisions can only be left blank. At the same time, due to the existence of the enterprise information islands, it will also affect the information-based grouping and industry-based application.

Information Integration planning and steps

Information Integration refers to the organic integration of information data of business application systems according to the characteristics of enterprise business processes and management processes, this allows you to share business application information and data to achieve business collaboration goals. The emergence of information islands is influenced by various factors such as the current IT technology development status, enterprise information decision-making, and enterprise resource status, and has different stages, therefore, the elimination of information islands is a very complex task for enterprises. At the same time, the information integration technology field is extremely professional. If there is a lack of proactive and comprehensive planning, it is possible that a larger information islands will be generated in the process of eliminating part of the information islands.

To effectively eliminate information silos and achieve information integration, we must examine and formulate the overall information construction plan from the perspective of comprehensive and long-term development at the overall height of the enterprise, and gradually form a model and specification for enterprise information integration. The combination of distance and distance should not only meet the current needs of enterprises, but also have good scalability and compatibility, and leave room for the development of enterprise informatization. The formulation of the overall plan requires certain experience in information construction and should have certain professional knowledge and talents. For most enterprises that do not yet have the ability to possess these resources, it is necessary to develop the overall information construction scheme through professional information consulting company services.

The enterprise information integration project should be roughly divided into four steps. First, senior industry experts and experienced engineers form a project implementation team to investigate, analyze, and evaluate the current situation of the enterprise, and help the enterprise analyze its overall operating environment, including hardware, software, networks, equipment, and human resources to determine the optimal integration time and possible risks. In terms of finance, the project team should provide detailed assessment reports on the ROI (ROI) and TCO (total cost of ownership) of enterprise system integration, to help enterprises make System Integration decisions based on whether and when. The second step is to start the specific design. The project team should design a specific system integration plan based on the enterprise's existing management model, business conditions, financial data, and other enterprise operation factors, this solution must focus on the interests and needs of all departments of the enterprise. The third step is to select a supplier with practical experience and good software architecture. Because the objects of system integration are dynamic, the business status of the enterprise changes every moment, and the business operation of the enterprise cannot be stopped, therefore, it is very important to select the best implementation time and the conversion mode between the old and new systems based on the actual situation of the enterprise. After the final integrated technical architecture is built, enterprises will also face an appropriate time period for delivery and transformation of the old and new systems. Suppliers should provide services to help enterprises smoothly survive the integration and polishing period, so as to minimize the risk of integration and enable enterprises to obtain greater return on investment.

Management and Technology in Information Integration

In fact, the existence of information islands is not only the absence of interaction between data conflicts and applications, but also the underlying reason for its management. The functional departments of an enterprise are in charge of various businesses of the enterprise, and inadvertently separate the originally unified information data in the enterprise. Due to the different requirements of management informationization, the focus of enterprise leaders is often lacking in the overall view, the Unified Business Flow of an enterprise cannot be reflected in all information systems. In this sense, information islands are also the ing of "isolated islands" in enterprise management, especially IT management. Looking at the low level of information technology and the unsatisfactory or even failed implementation of information integration software, it is basically in a state where there are many management layers, bloated organizations, chaotic processes, overlapping businesses, full people, unclear responsibilities, and low efficiency. Therefore, to ensure the realization of the enterprise information integration goal, we must re-engineer and optimize the business process to form a reasonable and effective business process, and strengthen process management, this ensures the same and shared information environment within and between enterprise departments, ensures smooth information and uniformity and integrity of information, and improves collaboration efficiency between departments, in this way, we can effectively monitor the business process and enhance the transparency and scientificity of the decision-making process.

In terms of technology, information integration is based on the existing IT application environment and usage requirements of enterprises. Different enterprises have different IT platforms, and their business processes and customer needs vary greatly, therefore, enterprise system integration also needs to be tailored according to the actual situation. Under the broad concept of system integration, there are various integration forms and means. From the integration means, there is physical integration, that is, integrating multiple devices into one or fewer larger devices to achieve unified management and rapid response, there is also a logical integration, that is, the centralized management of physically dispersed device resources and data through management software. From the application point of view, there are multiple forms such as server integration, storage integration, application integration, and data integration. What kind of enterprises are suitable for what kind of integration methods, and when to start integration is the best time ...... This series of problems has become a problem that must be solved when system integration begins to enter the business management agenda. They should be implemented one by one in the specific implementation process.

In addition, due to the lack of basic information resource management standards, an important task in information integration is to establish data standards, implement "data-centric" system integration and create a topic database. Topic databases should have the following features: (1) information sharing is supported; (2) All source data must be input in one system at a time (not multiple inputs); (3) each topic database consists of a basic table. The basic table is atomic (the data items in the table are data elements) and atomic (all output data can be generated from the table data) and normalization (the table data structure meets the requirements of the third paradigm and above ). The establishment of topic databases will lay a solid foundation for integrating information resources and implementing application system integration, and build a high-grade data environment.

In short, successful information integration must be ensured by the foresight of the Decision-Making layer, the due diligence of professional consulting and technical personnel, and the advanced technology and accurate financial analysis. Through the smooth implementation of the "integration" project, enterprises will more effectively configure information-centric resources, greatly improving the utilization of resources, so as to ultimately improve the core competitiveness of enterprises.